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02.26.2008 - Linksys WRT54G router (continued)

Needless to say I was pretty anxious to login to my new Linux router and begin tinkering around with it. I can do what? SSH to my router now??? Sounds good to me! Actually being able to ssh to my router was well worth the investment in itself!


Now I am able grock logs and setup cron processes right on the router's filesystem!

OpenWRT also comes with a web interface which is about average as far as user interfaces go. But functionality is really the key, which was pretty good. It includes alot of nice reporting tools regarding bandwidth usage. I really liked the DynDNS auto update feature. If you have DynDNS addresses this is a must have to prevent your domains from going stale. You can always use ddclient but I found this OpenWRT feature to be much more user friendly and of course didn't require a whole server to be up and running. Simply set your DynDNS domain name, DynDNS account username and password and the router does the work for you to automatically update DynDNS at scheduled intervals! Wish I had known about this years ago. On a related note, I ended up flashing my old wireless-b Linksys router to its latest firmware version and they had added this functionality as well. Just goes to show you .. update your firmware more than once every four years.

One significant drawback I have noticed with my new setup is my wireless coverage greatly decreased when I went from a wireless-b router to this new wireless-g router. I had read that this was a common occurance in this scenario and unrelated to OpenWRT firmware. In any event, to combat this I stumbled upon another firmware called Tomato which addresses this issue. It allows you to boost the signal of the router. Not only that but the interface looks much better and, from what I have read from user reviews, has better functionality compared to other firmwares.

Time for a switch. Tomato setup ... coming soon!